Module 3 - Blues and Swing

This week's readings and listening assignments were great fun for me, as the music started to dive into more recognizable music styles.  It is easy to make the connections between modern popular music and the music of the blues and swing.

The textbook and listening assignments first explored blues music from the 1920s and 1930s.  Blues music was categorized into two groups: classic blues (which was interestingly the type of blues that was adjusted to sound more like the hit music of the upper class) and country blues (which was truly the more original type of blues).  We listened to several pieces in each category.

The primary difference between classic blues and country blues is the refined stylizing of classic blues.  The African American performers who popularized blues, like W.C. Handy and Bessie Smith, were able to do so because they took stylized the more refined version to imitate some of the vocal qualities, but not all, from the country blues style.  It seems that America just wasn't "ready" for country blues yet, so the artists refined the music to imitate the music of dance bands, sentimental crooning songs, and Tin Pan Alley songs, adding just touch of blues, such as 12-bar blues form, to make it more refined.  Country blues artists kept things more authentic, often playing, as did Blind Lemon Jefferson in "The Black Snake Moan" and Robert Johnson in "Cross Road Blues" with their own ideas of tempos and meter and following less pronounced form.

Hillbilly records also came into play during that time period, which set the stage for what is now modern country music.  The primary difference between race music like the blues and hillbilly music was that hillbilly music was made by Caucasians for the enjoyment of Caucasians.  Maintaining deep roots in southern culture, hillbilly records involved more conservative values, standard hillbilly instruments like the fiddle, banjo, guitar, and mandolin, nasal, clear vocals, and southern twang in their accent that greatly appealed to the people of the south.  The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, while have distinctly different sounds, were the first artists to truly pioneer hillbilly music.

When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the music industry was greatly affected.  During the Great Depression, the Swing Era began, from 1935-1945, helping people to overcome and escape their difficult day-to-day life.  Swing music helped to recover the music industry during the Depression because of sales records with bigger dance bands.  I enjoyed listening to Swing music most of all this week.  My husband and I enjoy swing dancing together, so many of the pieces of music, like "Taking a Chance on Love" by Benny Goodman and His Orchestra" and "One O'Clock Jump" by Count Basie were familiar to us.  We tried out some of our swing moves as we listened, and it was lots of fun!  Fun is a great descriptive word for swing music.  It is no surprise to me that so many people used the music to escape their difficult lives during the Great Depression, since the great fun and upbeat music could help anyone escape!